Cebu among priority areas for anti-child labor efforts

CEBU — Due to the high incidence of child labor in Cebu, the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) has chosen the province as one of the priority areas for interventions.

Although the DOLE did not give any figures of how many children are working in Cebu, the province is considered one of the "hot spots" of child prostitution, where a number of children are found working in pyrotechnics, prostitution, domestic labor, mining and quarrying, deep-sea fishing, and sugarcane plantations.

Last month, the DOLE regional office and the International Labor Organization (ILO) reported that there are 1,025 child laborers in the towns of Bogo, Medellin, Samboan, Santander, Ginatilan and Oslob, and in the cities of Cebu, Lapu-Lapu and Mandaue.

Labor officials said these only represent a small chunk of the actual number of child laborers in Cebu.

Central Visayas has the second highest number of child laborers in the country with 388,000, after Southern Luzon which has 461,000, most of them exposed to hazardous working conditions. The number still does not include prostituted children.

With the increasing number of children being exposed to hard labor at an early age, the DOLE is conducting interventions and was able to remove some 12,500 children from the worst forms of child labor in 2003 and 2004.

The "rescued" children were extended educational assistance under the Philippine Time Bound Program (PTBP) of the labor department.

In its recent report, the DOLE’s Bureau of Women and Young Workers said the children were among those identified in baseline surveys conducted in 2003 and 2004 by the ILO-International Program on the Elimination of Child Labor in the Philippines.

The PTBP aims to reduce the worst forms of child labor by 75 percent by 2015 in six priority sectors — sugarcane plantations, pyrotechnics, deep-sea fishing, mining and quarrying, prostitution, and domestic labor. — Freeman News Service